This war is much more like a classic ‘old’ war. It’s a deep-rooted contest between two sides, and it’s showing us the difficulty of using military force for what the strategist Thomas Schelling described as ‘compellance’ – making people do what you want them to do.
Professor Mary Kaldor, Director LSE PeaceRep
Ukrainian victory is defined by the experience of pressure inside the Kremlin which forces a recognition of Ukrainian agency. That won’t necessarily lead to a peace agreement, though, and could even involve Putin declaring victory in some form or another
Professor Timothy Snyder, Yale University and Institute of Human Sciences (Vienna)
The Ukraine programme brings together seven global institutions, including the Kyiv School of Economics, and a network of researchers in Ukraine and the wider region to develop cutting-edge research, grounded in evidence collection on the ground that seeks to contribute directly to the protection of Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy.
The war in Ukraine is an ‘axial event’ in twenty-first century history, in which the agency of Ukrainians will have, one way or another, a tremendous impact on the future of global security. Whatever the outcome of the war will be, this conflict has already raised deeply troubling questions for the security of the international order. The central objectives of our project are to develop approaches that assist in preventing the fragmentation and disintegration of Ukraine and bring about a politically just and sustainable peace.
The project was launched on 1st October 2022.
The Programme
The outcome to the Russian war against Ukraine will be resolved by the contingencies of history. While a Ukrainian defeat is one of these possibilities and outcomes, the inherent openness of history also provides the point at which agency enters in. How Ukrainians and their allies respond will shape the contours of the changes that lie ahead.
Our project seeks to open up these potentials by supporting Ukrainians to seize the opportunities presented by this ‘axial event’ in world history to challenge authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy. Ukraine’s fate will shape the terms of the contest between democracy and authoritarianism globally, and whether societies based on human rights and the rule of law can rise to the acute challenges of the twenty-first century.
Through our transnational network of research, scholarship, policy and impact we support democratic actors in facing up to this historic task.
Our Projects
PeaceRep’s Ukraine team has comprised 10 projects across 3 thematic areas.
Project (i): Mapping Ukraine’s democratic space through local geographies: security and governance, economic wellbeing, social infrastructure and civicness.
Project (ii): Economic aspects of the conflict and the needs of the Ukrainian war-economy.
Project (iii): The gender cleavage and the war in Ukraine: women, civicness and conflict.
Project (v): Study group on ‘intellectual sovereignty’ and its potential for policy responses to war and violence, including comparative analysis vis-à-vis other sites of conflict.
Project (vii): Pursuing a just end to the conflict: agency, legitimacy and accountability.
Project (viii): The "Frontline states": perspectives on the war from Nato’s Eastern flank.
Project (ix): A new age of disorder? Global and regional security, defence policy and international governance after the Russian war on Ukraine
Project (x): Russia-Ukraine Dialogues event series
Key Concepts
The term ‘civicness’ has been developed by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Group based on an analysis of the ‘logics of public authority’ in sites of intractable conflict. By public authority we mean a legitimacy structure beyond the immediate family that commands voluntary compliance (e.g., municipalities). Civicness has been identified as a logic based on an implicit social contract in which revenue and votes may be exchanged for rights and the provision of public services (rather than, for example, on the basis of distributional rents linked to ethnic identity). It is a form of collective action that takes place at the mediation point between society and institutions and establishes some form of stability in societal relations. Civicness as an empirical phenomenon is ubiquitous in conflict zones, which exists alongside (and may be intermingled with) the dominant (violent) logics.
The Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion has been deeply rooted in the logic of civicness, as the democratic legitimacy of Ukraine’s institutions means that the state enjoys high levels of voluntary compliance in the population. Our argument is that it is crucial for the international community to provide support that assists Ukraine in maintaining its social infrastructure and, since 2014, emerging democratic public authority, in order to avoid a situation in which the state fragments and starts to break down. This goal implies also that maintaining, as far as possible, key social infrastructures – like healthcare, education, and so on – during wartime should not be seen as separate or secondary to the war-effort, but a key component of it which is vital to sustaining the underlying democratic fabric of Ukraine.
PeaceRep’s Ukraine team also seek to develop the concept of ‘intellectual sovereignty’. At the outbreak of the war, Ukraine’s educational and research institutions appealed for international supporters and academic partners to help the country protect what they called its ‘intellectual sovereignty’. Building on this call, we use intellectual sovereignty to refer to how the provision of public goods on a non-territorial or semi-territorial basis can be mobilised to support the territorial integrity of Ukraine as a democratic space under attack by Russia. For example, creating the means for Ukrainian refugees to interact and engage with citizens and institutions at home can both support the national war effort and address the fear that refugees, especially children, will lose access to their Ukrainian culture and identity. Central to the notion of intellectual sovereignty is the assumption that people living through conflict know more about that conflict that anyone else – and that these resources needed to be dawn on to build effective, robust analyses. Intellectual sovereignty is essential to enable on the ground analyses of what is happening and to preserve localised expertise. It is about giving priority to Ukrainian research and information as the basis for the formulation of policy outcomes.
Existing work by PeaceRep for the Global Transitions series looks at fragmentations in the global order and how these impact peace and transition settlements. In the context of a global order transition from a unipolar to multipolar world, peace and conflict processes have witnessed a ‘fragmentation of international actors’ with a ‘diversification of styles of engagement’. Building on and developing this argument, PeaceRep’s Ukraine team seeks to situate and analyse the war against Ukraine as part of a global fragmentation.While the Russian war against Ukraine aims at an outright annexation and colonisation it follows in respects a pattern built up of Russian approach presented as ‘mediation’ in past conflicts. By being underpinned by direct use of force, however, it clearly and dramatically contributes to the disruption and further fragmentation of the global normative order. We suggest that rather than a simple ‘return of geo-politics’ the situation in Ukraine marks a new political and economic fragmentation of geopolitical cooperation.
Rather than a simple resuscitation of classical frameworks based on inter-state dynamics and ‘great power’ competition we start from the assumption that such categories are poorly suited to account there is a need to better understand the crosscutting relations and constellations that shape contemporary global security challenges. And rather than a hierarchy of relations between global, national, local structures of political authority, we propose that research needs to focus in on the empirically observable disruption of these distinctions. Conceptualising the ‘new global fragmentation’ involves of grouping key features of the global conflict environment, such as: the systemic (e.g., political-economic) drivers of conflict and associated forms of authoritarianisation and sectarianism that transverse regime ‘types’ (democratic, non-democratic, etc.); the lowering of technological and geopolitical ‘barriers to entry’ for intervention; the subsequent proliferation of ‘new players’; the role of non-state actors operating across geopolitical boundaries; and the variegated, multi-layered features of even seemingly centralised states at war.
The Ukraine Invasion in an Age of ‘New Wars’ with Mary Kaldor - 4th March 2022: An interview with Mary Kaldor for the New Lines magazine podcast.
The War in Ukraine with Luke Cooper - 10th March 2022: A brief interview with Luke Cooper on the Compass podcast.
NATO, Human Security, the Changing Face of Global War and the Effectiveness of Sanctions and Debt Cancellation with Mary Kaldor - 17th August 2022 : An interview with Mary Kaldor for the Democracy in Question podcast.
Avoiding a Forever War in Ukraine with Luke Cooper - 24th October 2022: An interview with Luke Cooper for the Visegrad Insight podcast.
Russia - Ukraine Dialouges - From the 1st of November 2022, the LSE IDEAS Russia-Ukraine Dialogues is part-funded by PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme. For a full list of past and upcoming events .
Tymofii Brik is the Rector of KSE and Head of Sociological Research and Vice President for International Relations.
Nataliia Shapoval is the Chairman of the KSE Institute and Vice President for Policy Research.
Tymofiy Mylovanov is a President of Kyiv School of Economics and Associate Professor of the University of Pittsburgh.
Myroslava Savisko is a researcher and coordinator on the project, 'Mapping Ukraine's Democratic Space'.
Dr Katherine Younger is an IWM Permanent Fellow and Research Director of our Ukraine in European Dialogue program.
Professor Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Karolina Czerska-ShawisAssistant Professor and Programme Coordinator for the MA in Euroculture at the Jagiellonian University.
Wojciech Michnik is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security Studies at Jagiellonian University and contributing editor for New Eastern Europe.
Agata Mazurkiewiczis Assistant Professor at Jagiellonian University’s Department of National Security.
Dr Cindy Wittke is Head of Political Science Research Group at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS).
Dr Taras Fedirko is Lecturer in Organised Crime and Corruption, Central and Eastern European Studies.
